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Nina Wedell

2015; Elsevier BV; Volume: 25; Issue: 22 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.cub.2015.09.065

1879-0445

Nina Wedell,

Evolution and Genetic Dynamics

Nina Wedell is a Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Exeter based at the Cornwall Campus, UK. She studies the evolutionary ecology of sex, in particular the role of selfish genetic elements in sexual selection and sexual conflict. Her current research explores the potency of selfish genes in shaping the reproductive biology, mating system and even the sex of their host, and the ramifications this has for sex differences and viability of populations, particularly in insects. She is the current President of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology and President-Elect of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology. What turned you on to biology in the first place? As a child I was intrigued by natural history. I was always outdoors on excursions at the weekends with my parents and sister discovering things — in fact one of my earliest memories is sitting around a campfire with my father looking at a weird insect (or maybe it was a twig…). At the age of four, I wanted to be a lion tamer. When I was a little older, I wanted to be an author and explorer. And now, as a scientist, that’s what I am: science is exploration; I ask questions, conduct experiments and make observations, discover the answers and then write about it. And I get to travel all over the world and meet like-minded people, which is great! Initially my background was in the humanities, which I studied until the age of about 18. I then went back to school to study science, in adult education evening classes. I realised that biology was more than just an interest and something I wanted to spend my life doing. Luckily I managed to gain a place to study biology at the University of Stockholm, and that was it. And what drew you to your specific field of research? As a youngster and in my teens I devoured popular evolutionary biology books. I remember being mesmerised by Lynn Margulis’s speculations that organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts had their origin as symbiotic bacteria (but was less enamoured by James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis). I was also very keen on Stephen Jay Gould’s writings about speciation, and later discovered Dawkins and ‘The Selfish Gene’. That just blew me away; the idea that genes can be selfish and that conflict can exist between different genes within the same genome. My early research career was heavily influenced by my PhD supervisor, Christer Wiklund, and by a new lecturer at the Zoology Department at Stockholm University in Sweden, where I did my PhD. Anthony Arak was really excited about sexual selection and showed me these amazingly large sperm packages that the wartbiter (a bushcricket) produces at mating and that the female feeds on — examples of so-called ‘nuptial gifts’. The general wisdom was that males fill these gifts with nutrients that females use to increase the fitness of donating males, but we of course realised there is clearly scope for cheating and manipulations in this system. Unraveling the function of these nuptial gifts formed the basis of my PhD thesis, which took me on exciting field work in Australia — they have lots of bushcricket species there and I even discovered a new one — and cemented my interest in sexual selection, in particular in the question of why females of many species mate so many times. I was able to show that the bush cricket ‘love-gift’ can function both to protect the males’ ejaculate by acting like a chewing gum and keeping the female occupied during insemination, but also at times contain vital nutrients that boost female fecundity. My PhD supervisor Christer Wiklund is a butterfly expert and he generously allowed me to pursue my research on bushcrickets and later introduced me to the wonders of butterflies. I was fascinated by the way that most male butterflies and moths produce vast numbers of non-fertilizing sperm. This had been described at the turn of the last century and there were several hypotheses regarding their function, but little experimental work had been undertaken to test these ideas. I was able to show that, in at least one butterfly species, non-fertilizing sperm function to fill the female’s sperm storage organ and thereby reduce her receptivity and thus the dilution of male fitness by female remating. My passion for insect sperm was cemented when given the opportunity to do a post-doc in Geoff Parker’s lab at the University of Liverpool, which was a complete game changer for me as a scientist. I got to know several of my current colleagues and friends during these years, and really developed as an independent researcher fostered by Geoff’s generosity and sharp intellect. Eventually I managed to combine my passion for weird insect sex with selfish genes inspired by a couple of talks and publications. I heard Jeanne Zeh talk about selfish genes in pseudo-scorpions at an Ethology congress in Hawaii in 1995, and a year later heard a plenary lecture on sex ratio distorters in stalk-eyed flies by Jerry Wilkinson at the International Society for Behavioral Ecology congress in Canberra. That was it — I was completely hooked. Those talks and papers were the inspiration for a strand of my current research which explores the role of selfish genetic elements in sexual selection. This was to some extent helped by being on maternity leave in 2002 following the birth of my son, as I had time to really immerse myself in the literature and just read and think, which was wonderful. And I still find this topic so exciting! Do you have a scientific hero? Barbara McClintock is one of my all-time heroes. She was a cytogeneticist working on maize who discovered, amongst other things, transposition, showing that the mosaic color patterns of maize seed are produced by the action of mobile elements that she termed transposable elements. Sadly at the time, her research was subject to substantial skepticism and she stopped publishing this research in the early 1950s. Luckily, she eventually got the recognition she deserved, including the Nobel Prize in 1983! Just goes to show you should never give up. One of my colleagues has a quote by her at the bottom of his emails that I feel sums up her attitude: “I was just so interested in what I was doing I could hardly wait to get up in the morning...one of my friends said I was a child, because only children can’t wait to get up in the morning to get at what they want to do”. And obviously, another hero is Darwin! I know it sounds a bit clichéd, but he was genuinely a fantastic scientist, a sharp thinker and superb natural historian. Dame Linda Partridge, who explores the biology of ageing, is also an amazing and pioneering scientist, and I really admire Dame Miriam Rothschild, a self-taught natural historian who kept working until she was almost 90. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society and published prolifically, including some interesting poetry books, raised six children, and campaigned for human rights. What is the best advice you have been given? Be in it for the long haul. There is no quick and easy way of doing science and you have to trust your instinct, rather than trying to do ‘trendy’ research. If you find your work fascinating, there is a good chance that others will too. So try and believe in yourself. Read more papers, including ‘old classics’, as well as influential books. This will save you from reinventing the wheel, and give you a better understanding of where big ideas came from, how they matured and why they are really cool. To young researchers and PhD students my advice is to read, read and read more papers. And discuss what they mean with your peers — it is fun and absolutely critical! After all, being a scientist means you are expected to be a scholar, so you should be well-read and knowledgeable. Do you believe there is a need for more cross-talk between biological disciplines? Absolutely: there has been an explosion in technological advances in the last few decades that have enabled biologists from a range of disciplines to come together and tackle long-standing questions in a new light. Many of these technologies, like many molecular approaches, are also becoming more affordable and can now be applied to ‘non-model’ organisms, which often have interesting biology, meaning we have begun to make genuine inroads into unraveling the mechanisms underlying divergent phenotypes and behaviours. To my mind, the beauty is in combining exciting new techniques and approaches with well-defined and sound scientific questions, and not just engaging in a ‘fishing exercise’ in the hope of finding something interesting or in merely describing something in ever more minute detail. The recent data explosion has really paved the way for researchers to address fundamental evolutionary questions such as what are constraints, and the potential evolvability of populations, for example. This is likely only the beginning. There are lots of fascinating and long standing questions in evolutionary biology that we up until very recently have not been able to tackle, whereas now we may actually get the data we need to answer them. This sentiment is also echoed by funders who are currently very big on pushing the ‘inter-disciplinarity agenda’, and learned societies such as EMBO, for example, who strategically broadened their scope last year to include new members from the fields of ecology, evolution and neuroscience to reflect the growing impact of applying molecular biology to these disciplines and to highlight that the life sciences more generally will benefit from this type of cross-pollination. What aspect of science do you wish the general public knew more about? Evolution — lots of people think they know what evolution is, but tend to focus on speciation and our evolutionary history, often as subjects for dinner conversation. Remarkably little consideration is given to evolutionary issues of societal or economic importance, such as emerging diseases and insecticide and antibiotic resistance. It is rather telling (and deeply frustrating) that we as evolutionary biologists do not appear to be consulted or our advice sought regarding these issues. For example, antibiotic resistance seems to be almost exclusively discussed and debated by medical researchers in the press, whereas this really is a selection problem and the expertise in this area sits with evolutionary biologists. How can we resolve a situation where we impose strong directional selection without the inevitable outcome of emerging resistance? I think we evolutionary biologists have failed somewhere along the way in making what we do relevant to the general public. We are knowledgeable and often very passionate about research with practical evolutionary applications, but have not been very good as a group at highlighting the relevance and importance of our approach and findings to policy makers, politicians and the wider public. This has to change if we want to come up with long term and sustainable solutions to these issues. As scientists we need to be more willing to explain the relevance and applicability of our research. Here I think learned societies have a big role to play. The Royal Society is a shining beacon in that respect by proving a voice of reason in many public debates, and has very actively and succinctly articulated their opinion for centuries. There is now a growing awareness also in other learned societies such as ESEB, ISBE and ASAB, for example, of the need to lobby politicians and journalists to get our voice heard and to be able to contribute more widely by coming up with workable solutions, or at least start to tackle these problems from a different angle. One of my pet sayings is: ‘Think of evolution as the solution’. Rest assured that for many of the issues that we have today, evolution has already come up with a way round it — that is how evolution proceeds. And there are now a growing number of academics and inventors who are beginning to apply evolutionary principles to harness the solutions that evolution has provided in an innovative way. So I think it is an exciting time for evolutionary biologists, but we must be better at communicating why the work we do is important and relevant.